Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Keep the gates's closed

At Chapters Coquitlam in June, there was a display of many copies of Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. Next to the display was a Gates Picks notice - A Book Review by Bill Gates. The final paragraph of the notice is seen above, in which Bill's last name is changed to Gate based on the apostrophe's location. Then, it should be Mr. Gates's Facebook page (note the apostrophe-S and the noncapitalized page), and author shouldn't be capitalized. As well, I think a comma before and a comma after the website would be better than having the colon. It's a crap sentence unbecoming a bookstore, but in my view this post doesn't outdo this post. Click the image to enlarge it.

1 comment:

Laura said...

I understand that creating the possessive of a name ending in S can be a matter of house style. In the US, most newspapers follow Associated Press style, which calls for just an apostrophe and not an apostrophe S. But why do some writers shove the apostrophe before the S that's part of the name? I just don't get it.